


Monsters in the Closet

by girl_wonder



Category: Supernatural
Genre: POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:44:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/pseuds/girl_wonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even demons have bedtime stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monsters in the Closet

Title: Monsters in the Closet  
Author: fryadvocate  
Rating: R  
Pairing: Gen  
Disclaimer: I don't own the SPN universe.

Summary: Even demons have bedtime stories.

*****

Cain said, "Sister's gone crazy, baby."

Chewing on the bones of humans, Esau said, "Always been crazy."

"Not like this," said Cain, spitting out human hair, long and dark, longer than Cain would ever let her own hair grow, Esau knew. "Wants to take over one of the human kids. Samuel Winchester. Take him over or sleep with him."

Esau wouldn't want to be that went up Sam Winchester's ass. She wouldn't have had the balls to possess him, not even to get out of Hell. Some said... Well. Her father said Sam Winchester might be the Morningstar.

"Older sister's gone crazy," Esau agreed. She watched the distance for the approaching army.

*****

Esau was the youngest of her father's three daughters. Her birth fell three days before the celebration of Lillith's death. Later, on Earth, walking among humans, she would say that her birthday was on Christmas Eve, because humans were too short sighted to worship the birth of Judas or the death of Pilate.

Her father named his first two daughters after God's least favorite children: Cain and Jezebel. They were the names of revolutionaries because her sisters were born before he realized that revolution wouldn't happen in Hell.

After her mother dropped her like a horse drops a foal, standing, so that the first thing she knew was the sharp hurt of the ground, it was her father who picked her up, smeared the blood across her cheek, and kissed her as she screamed because of the pain of living.

He named her after Esau, the unloved. Her mother bore no more children for her father, as numb to his beauty as she was to the pain of her existence. And for centuries, Esau thought that she was the last of her mad father's children.

Then she found out about the human women.

*****

Her sisters loved the rough and tumble of their youth, the pain of fighting a sharp relief from the pain of living. They loved the knives and blood, the death, the constant struggle; they loved ruling in Hell, because they didn't know yet what it meant to serve on Earth.

They fought with the servants to maintain the walls, and then they fought the servants to keep fast their bedroom doors. They fought their suitors to maintain their dominance, and as the bodies piled outside those doors, they grew more desired.

Esau learned to fight because her sisters used her as a whet stone, honing their ability to torture on her flesh. They stood strong, invincible, because it had been their father who sired them. Their bitch mother had given them nothing more than skin and a safe place to grow until they could be foaled.

The first demon she killed had fought his way as far as her bedroom, fought his way past her servants and snuck his way past her sisters, and almost had her as his prize: her skin would have been his skin, her power his power.

Standing silently, her father watched from a corner, his eyes yellow and brilliant. He would let this man have her if she didn't do something and in that moment she understood her sisters' fury.

"Father," she said, her voice sobbing. She cowered in a corner, one hand hugging her exposed breasts. " _Father_."

His hand flashed and buried a knife in the wall next to her hand. Without thought, she pulled it out and drove it into her suitor's chest. Later, she would know it hadn't been luck, but the constant struggle with her sisters that had made her aim so good.

The blade was the finest that had ever been made and he let her keep it, even when her sisters whined and preened before him, their kills made with their own two hands.

Her first kill was hung from their walls as a warning: The third daughter of Azazel was just as able as her sisters.

But, she had learned something from that that neither of her sisters had ever understood, tears, even ones salted by crocodiles were just as effective as brute force.

And so the third daughter of Azazel took her time to learn subtlety as though it was a weapon. Her next suitor became her champion, and the one killed him became her lieutenant, and the one that killed him became new blood on her hands.

*****

She went to the pens, a servant at her side, bowing obsequiously as she pointed to cowering humans. They flinched away from her, and because of her father's gifts she barely felt the sting of Hell anymore, but the humans never grew thicker skin, they just grew more and more insane.

It was trial and error to figure out which humans were too damaged to help her and which were too evil to see the benefit of her proposition.

The knife worked as well on humans as it did on demons and it was strange to see their souls disappear, but not as strange as truly killing a demon had been.

"That one," she said. "I'll take him."

Carefully, one at a time, she chose the humans she would use. The sinners who hadn't thought, hadn't realized, hadn't seen, _oh, god, we're in hell_ , became her mentors and from the harlots she learned seduction, and from the gamblers she learned to read people. From the liars she learned to act and from the murderers she learned to kill.

Her knife still sliced through demons like a reaper through souls, and she learned to keep her hysteria down during that moment of terror after she killed them. As long as the knife was in her hand, it meant that it couldn't be turned against her, against her sisters, against her father.

It meant that she could kill demons.

When she learned about the human women, she learned about the knife. Her hysteria would have been immeasurable if she had understood at the time that the knife was made by humans.

*****

"Our father is insane," Jezebel said.

"Mad," Cain agreed, tightening the leather of her armor.

"You won't follow him?" Esau asked, even though she knew what the answer was.

"Of course we will," Cain said, and plunged the sword in her hand down onto Esau's knee.

Even to her own ears, her scream sounded like ecstasy.

*****

None of them moved when their father first offered it to them. Jezebel ate with hands she had murdered for, the flesh sewn together in a parody of art.

Esau would not know what art was until she came to Earth.

They were men's hands, rough with calluses. Jezebel was the first to wipe her palms on the table and say, "What?"

Her father licked his lips and said, "I will bring Lucifer to Earth, because he has disappeared from Hell."

At the time, Esau had looked to Cain, the most preserved of the three of them, her skin almost all her own, only her neck traded with a dead man's. Before Earth, Esau thought that this was a sign of strength, the type of military strategy their father was too powerful to need. Cain had watched their father with black eyes, patient as he explained that he had seen Lucifer in a dream before the three of them had been born, and in that dream he had seen a war on Earth as brutal as the war that created Hell.

Cain had said, "You're going to get us to Earth?"

"Yes," their father had nodded, drawing out the word as a long hiss. "And you'll have to stay there until the plan is complete."

"We'll go," Jezebel had answered. "What do we do?"

*****

Esau killed her servants, all of them, one after the other, like snapping the necks of birds in cages.

She couldn't have her sisters knowing what she was planning, and her father listened to the insanity inside of him more than he listened to her.

"Father," she tried. "Maybe we shouldn't force them."

But her father looked at her, looked at the body she'd made for herself, hair and face taken from her kills and said, "I need you to stay here. Round up the flock. It's going to be a party when we open up the gate."

"You want me to stay in Hell," Esau said, slowly. Jezebel might last in Hell. Cain would rule it. Esau shrank at the idea of surviving without her father.

"I want you to have them organized so that when it's time, they'll march rank and file." Her father cupped her cheek, his palm hot. "You're the charmer."

Ducking away from her father's hand, Esau let the blade bite her hand, let it draw blood, but not nearly enough to kill. She stood straighter in the worn pants that Jezebel had traded her for use of a human soul as bait.

"The humans made a gun that can kill anything," her father said, relentlessly angry. "Why do they have Earth, when all they want is to destroy each other?"

Her knees bloodied on the rough ground as she knelt before her father. Fury dripping from her bitten lip, she said, "Yes, Father."

*****

Hell was so much larger than her father's walls. Azazel had kept his fortress well-supplied and well-guarded, but the job he asked of her made her travel farther than either of her sisters had ever been.

Hell was larger than she had ever imagined and rather than risk a servant's betrayal, she went to the pens again and chose the most corrupt of all madams, the one whose soul had been soiled so many times it was nearly tatters.

"Heel," she said, and passed on the burden of her pack to the woman.

The woman was a bent caricature of seduction, crippled and lame and still smiling a pained offer of sex. She said, "Thank you, thank you."

Esau's lip twisted and she stepped away on feet she had won from a would-be suitor.

"We're going to do something impossible," Esau said. "And you're probably going to die doing it."

The woman didn't meet her eyes, but whatever spark inside her that had brought her to hell made her spine straighten, made her shift into someone who had once seduced men out of money and love. Her hair, what little demons hadn't torn out to use on their own heads, was black and curled.

Azazel's third daughter would always be the one who understood humans the best.

*****

They lost as many possible allies as they gained and Esau learned how to pick her marks. The whore was the first one who said, "Give it a name."

At the time, they were camped out so far from her father's walls that Esau could not even see any of the landmarks she'd grown up knowing: the valley of salt pillars, the angels' graveyards. The sky above them was burnt and her mouth tasted of blood. That was the only thing familiar at all.

"Azazel's army," Esau said immediately, and laughed at the same time the whore did. It was a choked unnatural sound: demons were not born knowing how to laugh; they learned it when they discovered that Earth was real.

"Legion," Esau said finally. Her father was right about one thing. There were as many in Hell who would fight for the chance to see Lucifer as those who would fight for the chance to be free.

"Are you Legion?" Esau tried on the next demon. "Are you Legion or are you a coward who sits and sulks in the corner of Lucifer's prison cell?"

Her father's army was slowly grumbling to life, unnaturally organized. In secret, she knew that the message her father spoke to the Legion was not why they stayed patient for decades, slicing their feet on the razor-sharp ground. They stayed patient, she knew, because she understood demons almost as well as she understood humans.

And the sky burned and her flesh melted until Esau skinned the whore and used her flesh as new.

*****

Jezebel told her about the women. Her lip was pulled back from her teeth and she seemed strange in her skin, shifting.

"A human woman will bear Lucifer," she sneered. Her shoulder popped and she twisted it once before yanking her arm off at the elbow.

Esau didn't blink. "A human?"

Dropping her sister's eyes, Esau reached into her bag and pulled out an arm she'd been saving in case she lost her own. Jezebel took it in her hand and used coarse thread to sew the flesh together, ignoring Esau's extended hand, a silent offer to help fix her sister's patchwork body.

Who needed the parody of a body in hell when there were beautiful hosts waiting on Earth?

"He already has so many women pregnant. Lucifer. Human spawn." Jezebel bit off the thread.

"How will he figure out which is Lucifer?"

Jezebel's eyes glinted obsidian when she grinned at her sister. "How do we decide who rules in Hell?"

For a moment, Esau looked up at the cracked sky and couldn't hide her own grin.

"That knife he gave you was made by human hands," Jezebel said, searching through her pack and pulling out a handful of human brain to eat.

The whore shivered in her naked bones, eyes darting between Jezebel and Esau.

"Human hands?" Esau stole a piece from Jezebel, ignoring the look her sister sent her.

"You're dependent on human creation," Jezebel's mouth was streaked with red, and she licked at the corner of her lip.

Furious, Esau's fingers dug into her sister's new forearm, watching her sister blink once before she pulled apart the freshly sewn flesh. "And your army is dependent on _me_. The Legion wouldn't ever follow you."

It was the last time she saw Jezebel in Hell.

*****

Her nostrils were burning when she reached the edge of Hell, a steep cliff that broke off into incredible nothingness, a blank endless fall that made her shiver even if she couldn't remember what was supposed to be after nothing.

*****

Where they'd avoided the cities on their way to the edge of Hell, picking out the demons that were alone and lonely and willing to listen, they sought out society on their way back to her father's house. The cities were erected with bones and skin, roofs made of human hair, windows made of eyelids, bedframes made of teeth.

Her voice wasn't loud enough for city squares but it was more than soft enough for the corners of bars. There weren't as many in cities who were willing to follow her to Lucifer, but there were more willing to take over Earth than she'd found in the wild lands.

"Who do we follow?" one of the demons asked. His mouth was empty, tongue touching his gums in a parody of speech.

"Azazel," she said. "And then the Chosen One."

"A human?" he sneered, spittle falling on their table.

"The boy born Lucifer," she said.

"And what if," his hand reached for her cheek and she pulled herself back far enough that he couldn't touch. "What if they fall?"

"Then you follow me," she said. "I'm leading you out of hell."

*****

No one was there to greet her when she finally was able to flee the choking heat of hell for the ice cold of Earth. She screamed in terror; while her body in Hell had never really been hers, she had never known what it was to be incorporeal, to be without a center.

The first body she found was of an old woman, flesh sagging with age. No flesh in Hell survived long enough to sag, it was burned or cut or blistered until it was replaced.

Esau reveled in her new body, in the wrinkled cheeks and the heavy breasts. Her father found her, walking slowly through a supermarket and he stopped her cart with a hand.

"What are you doing?" he asked, and inside, the mind she'd bottled up shrieked with relief that finally someone had noticed old Mrs. Lawson was acting irregularly.

Esau smirked. "I thought it was time I saw the leaders of the revolution."

He blinked. "I meant in that corpse."

Reaching towards her, she had a sudden moment of horror that he'd be able to pull her out of her new skin, that he'd be able to reach into the old woman's chest and rip her out.

Instead, he snapped her neck, a swift movement that she felt even as it didn't make her fall. Old Mrs. Lawson rolled her shoulders and stood straighter against her shopping cart.

"I won't take you to see them in that mess," her father said.

It was 1984 in human years, and she was certain that they couldn't count back far enough to find the year she'd been born. But, glancing away from the group of kids laughing at her careful steps, she knew that she didn't feel as old as Mrs. Lawson did.

*****

Changing hosts was easy, made easier now that she understood how to do it.

The boy's name was Jason and he didn't scream at all inside her head. Instead, he yelled and cursed at her and from him, she learned every curse word in English and some in Spanish.

She met her father at the house and watched a soft, pretty brunette put a baby to bed. Jezebel stood sentry on the roof as Esau climbed in to the baby's window, looking down at him. He was a small, pug-nosed thing, face red and swollen shut as though he was allergic to life.

Inside, Jason was retching, and if he'd still been in control, the stomach would have already emptied a cheeseburger and chili fries on to the pink carpet.

Esau reached down and touched the baby's forehead gently.

"Lord?" she asked, quietly.

Both of Jason's legs broke at the knees when she jumped down off the roof, and she couldn't help grinning with glee. If the body had been real, she would have had to wait until someone with working legs came along so she could kill them for their joints. Instead, she stood up as Jezebel climbed down off the roof.

"You should be more careful," Jezebel said, zipping her jacket closed over her breasts. Irritated, she pushed up on her breasts and then down, trying to make them fit behind the zipper. "You break it too much and you'll have to get a new one."

"Whatever," Esau said. She liked that word. It was what Jason said to his mother, bored and upset. _Whatever_.

The body felt strange over her, slightly off, like ill-fitting armor.

"How do you like being a woman?" Esau asked. She twisted a lock of Jezebel's hair between her fingers and almost tugged it out until she thought better of it.

"Beats being Frankenstein," Jezebel said. Her laugh sounded different coming out of an intact voicebox.

Esau laughed with her and didn't say, "I don't get it."

*****

The first time she tried on Ruby, it fit like coming home. It fit better than her old body, tended to by the whore in Hell, an empty vessel waiting for her to return.

Ruby was meek, a soft little girl who didn't have any calluses on her hands. Ruby said, "please, please, please" where Jason had said, "bitch, bitch, bitch." Eventually, Ruby fell silent, quieter than an empty grave, and sometimes, she would offer up useful bits, and sometimes she'd just ramble.

It took Esau a while to recognize the ramblings as insanity, because they sounded a lot like her Father.

She was careful with the new body, worked it gently into a shape she wanted and after two months of rope climbing and martial arts, it had the muscle and calluses she needed. After two months, it felt almost like her own body.

That, more than anything, showed her that she could meet her sisters in this body.

Jezebel and Cain were holed up together in New York, killing person after person in their hellish apartment in Brooklyn.

Esau didn't knock when she opened the door. It was a hot summer and neither sister was wearing a shirt, both bare to the waist and slick with blood. Jezebel's new body was a boy taller than Cain, blonde and feral looking. The new body fit her and Esau wondered how long before she got bored enough to kill it.

Cain said, "Practice," like that explained anything at all.

Neither of them commented on Ruby and Esau felt a strange anger.

"Esau," Cain said, her voice bored already.

"Ruby," Esau corrected. "Call me Ruby."

"You're taking the cow's name? How feminist of you. Empowerment through naming," Jezebel's hands made slow sticking sounds as she clapped.

"It's smart," Esau said. "It's smart in case anyone's looking for us."

"Ruby," Cain said, still bored. "Pass me the cleaver."

*****

The next time she saw Cain, she was dead, trapped in the same skin she'd hated. It was a boy named Michael that she'd had for months, and Esau knew she wanted something fresh because she'd broken every single one of Michael's fingers. Esau petted his hair back from his forehead, away from the bullet hole.

"Sister," she said.

The flesh puppet meant nothing, but she forced herself back into hell to burn Cain's real body.

Jezebel was there, rocking back and forth on her knees, staring at Cain's corpse.

"Jezebel," Esau said.

"Ruby." Jezebel's teeth were exposed where something had eaten away her cheek. The whore, tried to bring her water, but Jezebel's hand slapped back, snapping the whore's neck. All that was left of the whore was meat on bones, and on Earth she would have been dead for decades, but in Hell there wasn't any death, nothing after, just this forever and ever.

"What happened?" Esau sat down across from Jezebel and noticed that her own flesh was in such disrepair. Had it really been that long since she was inside her own skin?

"The Winchesters killed Meg," Jezebel reached out for Cain's skin and tore off a ring finger, placing it between her lips like a lollipop. "It's all his fault."

"Sam?" Esau had to struggle to remember which of her father's chosen children had been named Winchester.

"Azazel." Jezebel spit Cain's nail out and cracked the bone with her teeth. "Fuck him."

"You didn't even like Meg," Esau said. Esau was her father's daughter but in her insanity, Esau thought that Jezebel was the most faithful progeny.

"I _loved_ her," Jezebel said, and the way her eyes lit, Esau knew that Jezebel thought that was the truth.

With the whore's help, Esau took Cain's body and tossed it over the edge of Hell. There weren't any words said, because that was something that humans did.

Hell burned brighter now, more agony and she didn't even have to work to convince the pilgrims that if they followed Azazel, he would lead them to Lucifer.

It was such human irony, she thought, that when she started to doubt, it became easier to create belief in others.

*****

Ruby was right where Esau had left her, and if she even noticed she had had control of her own skin for the days that Esau had gone back to Hell, she hadn't done anything more than cover her eyes.

She met Jezebel, possessing a woman barely twenty-one, gorgeous, but thin. The way the body walked reminded Esau of humans in hell that only had their bones left, an awkward gait made of too many angles.

"I'm going to find him," Jezebel said. "And see how he likes someone ruining _his_ life."

The trail of broken people she left in her wake made it easy for Esau to keep track of Jezebel.

Her father's madness was spiraling and Esau understood that there was only one boy born Lucifer and as human as he was, it would be far better to tempt him into sin than drag him there through the blood of his cohort-brothers.

"Those bastards killed them," her father said. "Both of them."

Ruby nee Esau didn't tell her father that Jezebel was alive and living the life she would have been if her father had never gone mad and decided to bring the Lord back from oblivion. Instead, she polished her knife and said, "Tell me how Colt made the gun."

Mechanically, her father recited the steps: hammer to breach to cylinder. "And then belief," he spit.

"As in cross your heart, pray to kill some demons?" Ruby tossed her hair, long was in now and she was glad she'd never cut her hair.

Sneering to reveal his rotting teeth, he said, "As in, the one weapon hunters have that can actually kill us. They believe in that gun, and it's like Christmas and the Easter Bunny and the fucking Tooth Fairy. Of course it's real."

Carefully quiet, Ruby wondered if he realized where he even was.

*****

She was waiting for the others when the gate opened, and personally, she'd been rooting for Sam Winchester, if only because when she killed him to formally take power, it would be more satisfying. Whoever this new guy was, he was a soldier and she could understand soldiers. He might be more easily controllable than Sam.

Jezebel laughed hysterically in her ear, the body of a child completely hollowed out and used. Ruby knew that Jezebel had already broken a couple of the girl's ribs for fun, nearly poked out one of the girl's blue eyes to see if it would grow back. "They're coming, they're coming, they're coming."

"Jezebel, shut up before I rip your tongue out."

The little girl dragged her nails down Esau's arm, leaving skin torn. "I told you, it's _Meg_."

"Meg's dead." Esau dragged her blade across a whet stone and listened to the sound of demon-killing metal. "The Winchesters killed that body."

Jezebel tore at Ruby's hair, blonde strands coming away in her fingers. The body must be rotting to give so easily to a child. Esau gritted her teeth. She hadn't even noticed Ruby's death.

Angrily, Esau said, "Right. Meg. You want some cheese with that denial or are you taking it to go?"

When things went wrong, and no one showed up, she found herself wondering if Sam Winchester really was the boy born Lucifer. If she'd let her father play too close to the fire because she thought there might be some truth in his insanity.

*****

Back in her hotel room, she watched Meg with one eye as she packed.

"Lucifer." Meg snorted, her eyes rolling with disgust. She'd painted the little girl's lips a whore's red, had cut her jeans off just below her underwear and torn the shirt off barely below the breasts.

"What you think that any old human could kill Dad?" Ruby was dressing the part, half Buffy, half Jessica Moore. It had only taken a little research to realize what Sam would respond to. She couldn't let any other demon get to him first.

Ignoring her sister's sulk, she patted Meg on the head. "Play nice with the others. I'd hate to have to bury another sister."

"Be careful," Meg said, abrupt. She took a cigarette out of Ruby's suitcase and lit it with a Zippo she'd picked up in Vietnam. "They're dangerous and loyal."

"I'm dangerous," Ruby smirked.

Meg's laugh was high pitched and insane. "Baby sister, don't you know? That's the motherfucking Morningstar who came back when his brother asked him to."

Frowning, Ruby bent down to pick up her bag and didn't mention the fact that Meg didn't believe in Lucifer.

"Just because I don't believe it, doesn't mean it isn't true." Meg dropped her cigarette onto the polyester comforter and sat on it as it began to burn.

Ruby closed the door behind her.

*****

end.


End file.
